Disability as a cause of girls' systematic marginalization and exclusion from education

• In Event: The Washington group questions and leave no girl behind: measuring disability prevalence among out-of-school adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa

Proposal

The Strategic Approaches to Girls’ Education (STAGE) project targets 20,100 girls in 6 regions of Ghana. Girls included in the program will be highly vulnerable and marginalized due to factors such as early marriage, pregnancies, disabilities, among others. STAGE focuses on disability as one of the key criteria for inclusion due to its effect of systematic marginalization and exclusion. The project has an initial target of including a proportion of around 10% (2010) of girls with disabilities.
In Ghana, disabilities are often viewed as ‘bad luck’ or a ‘disgrace’ for families, leading to social stigma and ostracism. The stigma, based on cultural attitudes and beliefs, as well as extreme vulnerability and risk of exposure to acts of abuse, humiliation, and discrimination cause families to hide their disabled children, excluding them from community life. Even where families might consider educating children with disabilities, schools are often not suitable for or equipped to receive them. Little support is available from the government to schools be more inclusive and integrate children with disabilities. Teachers are not well trained in inclusive education and are ill-equipped to handle disability in the classroom. Institutional support mechanisms and services are weak. These intersecting factors make girls with disabilities (GWDs) among the most educationally marginalized subgroups in Ghana.
The project will collaborate closely with partners such as the Girls Education Unit and Special Education Unit of the Ghana Education Service (GES) to develop basic training modules and teaching and learning materials to facilitate the adequate provision of support to GWDs. Teachers and facilitators at STAGE literacy centres as well as key district and community level stakeholders will receive training on socially inclusive teaching methodologies. Community Child Protection Committees will receive additional training to equip them to provide disability-based educational and psychosocial support. After the Accelerated Literacy Programs (ALPs), STAGE will support their enrolment in integrated formal schools, special educational institutions for those with more severe disabilities and where appropriate, vocational training appropriate for the type of disability faced. STAGE will also collaborate with Ghana Federation of Disability Organisations (GFD) and special needs schools to adequately provide and advocate for the particular needs of these girls. Further, STAGE aims to diminish social stigmatization towards persons with disability through active community engagement and sensitization, promoting awareness of the government’s inclusive education policy and guidance on how to put it into action.
World Education will work closely with its contracted STAGE external evaluators to use the Washington Group set of questions to collect disaggregated data on disability. The baseline data collection tools will be administered at the household level, and identify those girls with difficulty doing certain activities at “a lot of difficulty” or “cannot do at all.” In addition to seeing, hearing, walking, these activities would include dressing, communicating and remembering or concentrating, which would point to cognitive, intellectual, and emotional/behavioural disabilities. Data collection for baseline evaluation is scheduled for February 2019. World Education expects that analysis of the baseline data will provide rich detail about the prevalence and nature of the girls’ disabilities and inform program interventions. The presentation will also share lessons on implementation of the Washington Group set of questions as part of the data collection tools which will inform and benefit similar education programs and the broader community.

Authors

• Amogh Basavaraj, World Education, Inc.

• Susan Adu-Areey, World Education Inc.

• Kate Sykes, Link Community Development International